Yesterday, we hit the 10 year mark commemorating the second Stanley Cup Riot in Vancouver, following the game 7 loss of the Vancouver Canucks, and many of the lessons of that are still relevant today.
In a world that is still reeling from a Trump presidency and is slowly clawing its way out of a global pandemic, for better or for worse, human nature will always find a way to assert itself. For better, people will eventually adapt to a new normal and some will even thrive (although even more of us won't). But, through it all, patterns consistently emerge, revealing a lot of truths about people in general.
While many will have their opinions about the various causes of the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot, a couple of key facts stand out. One, is that there were people who specifically came to downtown Vancouver who were specifically intent on causing trouble, in that they were wearing shirts specifically indicating that they were there for the riot, while others had brought tools and weapons for destroying property. Another, is that the vast majority of the people that were arrested for participating in the riot and related charges (property damage, assault, theft) were people with no particular predisposition towards criminal behavior, like an arrest record.
Since the riot, I've done casual reading on psychological experiments such as the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. For those unaware, the Milgram Experiment had participants being ordered to deliver increasing voltages of electric shocks to an unseen person, unaware that it's a simulation, and eventually delivering a fatal shock. The Stanford Prison Experiment placed people in a simulated prison environment and participants fell into their roles as prisoner or guard so quickly that the experiment had to be terminated early. In both cases, participants were a random sampling of individuals, most (or all) of whom who had no criminal background, yet due to external factors, such as being given orders from an authority figure or falling into a role of one, were willing to do the wrong thing without much encouragement.
When traditional news media is in terminal decline and people largely getting their news from social media, I've been seeing an increasing number of friends and acquaintances posting and sharing content containing that ranges from misleading to outright false, and certainly, I've been duped by some content before. But if this is upsetting, this is because this is done by people who I know to at least somewhat intelligent and educated.
Which brings us back to social experiments and real world examples like the Stanley Cup Riots. Regardless of how smart or savvy we might think ourselves, pretty much anybody is susceptible to manipulation. While most of us haven't been manipulated into criminal behaviour, if you've ever seen an advertisement and then went on to buy something that you didn't even need or want, you can be manipulated.
Beyond this, there are many real-world examples of this happening. Prior to the Stanley Cup Riots, there was a chilling case in which a prankster was calling multiple McDonald's restaurants from a payphone and impersonating a police officer, who then manipulated employees into submitting to humiliating sex acts under the pretense of a police investigation, all without even showing a badge. Even though he was caught, he was acquitted on all charges, while one of the people who was manipulated into sexually assaulting an employee was given 5 years. More recently, there's the assault of the Capitol building, where the majority of those arrested had no ties to any right wing militia group, and that one is going to take a long time to resolve.
This is not to say that anyone manipulated towards wrong doing necessarily warrants sympathy or leniency, but rather that pretty much anybody is vulnerable to being manipulated, which would be much to our detriment if we were to ignore that. If people can be convinced that the world is flat and that vaccines cause autism, with the right set of triggers, people can be motivated to do anything up to and including murder and genocide.
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